The Effect Of Activity-based Intervention Group Training On Parent-child Dyad Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Their Parents

High-quality parent-child interaction/parent-child relationship has a great impact on child’s social, language, emotion and mental development. But some researches show that, the interaction between children with autism spectrum disorders and their caregivers (parents) is different from that of typical developmental children and children with other type of disorders, which will influence the development of children with ASD. So it is necessary to pay attention to how to improve the interaction between children with ASD and their parents. Lots of researches proved that parents’intervention skills and children’s development can be improved by parent training.Chinese parents of children with ASD also have a demand for parent training, but the researches are limited. To explore a suitable parent training pattern and the training effect on parent-child interaction, a quasi-experimental study by attending an activity-based intervention parent training given by a professional in special education was conducted. The parent training was carried out in Shanghai for two phases. Each phase lasted for 2 months, and 10 families attended the training in each phase. The researcher collected interaction videos before and after the training, and focused on the interaction of parent-child dyads.The researcher coded the videos, analyzed the data, and collected the feedback from the trainer and the parents who attended the training. The results showed that:(1) the interaction between parents and children with ASD was good before attending training; (2) parent training had a good impact on parent-child interaction, especially, the improvement of communication, overall rating, the rate of children’s verbal behavior, joint engagement, interaction turns and the rate of children’s response of experimental group had been significant; (3) the improvement for some factors which had a great impact on children’s development, such like responsivity/sensitivity and enjoyment, was limited; (4) parents’ willingness to change and their involvements would influence the effect of parent training.According to the results of this research, the researcher put forward a few suggestions:(1) to pay attention to the emphasis and difficulty of interaction between children with ASD and their parents, parents trying to follow children’s lead,to be sensitive to their cues in daily routines and activities and to give naturalized reinforcement in time; (2) to make a combination between group training and one-to-one training, to make a full use of online resources and to explore a training pattern which is more effective, systematic and long-lasting.